Civil Rights Events

Little Rock Nine

Elizabeth and Hazel

Who doesn’t know that face?

It’s the face of a white girl—she was only 15 years old, but everyone always thinks her older than that, and judges her accordingly—shouting at an equally familiar, iconic figure: a sole black school girl dressed immaculately in white, her mournful and frightened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, clutching her books and walking stoically away from Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 4, 1957—the date when, in many ways, desegregation first hit the South where it hurt.

It’s all in that white girl’s face, or so it has always appeared. In those raging eyes and clenched teeth is the hatred and contempt for an entire race, and the fury of a civilization fighting tenaciously to preserve its age-old, bigoted way of life. You know what the white girl’s saying, but you can’t print it all: commands to get out and go home —“home” being the place from which her forebears had been dragged in chains centuries earlier. That what that white girl was actually doing that day was more grabbing attention for herself than making any statement of deep conviction doesn’t really matter. Of anyone with that face, you simply assume the worst. You also assume she is beyond redemption, especially if, symbolically, she is more useful as is than further understood or evolved.

…

The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine. Moments earlier, she’d tried to enter Central High School, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Gov. Orval Faubus. A mob baying at her heels, Elizabeth is making her way, fearfully but determinately, toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the bus stop a block away.

The face belongs to Hazel Bryan. Hazel, the daughter of a disabled war veteran, was largely apolitical, even on matters of race; while sharing the prejudices of her parents, she cared far more about dancing and dating. Being in that crowd that morning, making a ruckus, out-shouting all of her friends, was a way of getting noticed, and far more exciting than going into class. She’d thought nothing would come of what she’d done, and nothing ever would have had she not been captured in mid-epithet by Will Counts, a young photographer for the Arkansas Democrat (Margolick, “Lives” 1-2)

About Hazel Bryan, Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby recalled: she was "rather pleased with herself"—so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as [her friends] Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.

Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years—except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled (Margolick, “Lens” 6-7).

If anyone in the picture, which reverberated throughout the world that day and in history books ever since, should feel aggrieved, it’s of course Elizabeth Eckford. What Counts had captured both symbolized and anticipated the ordeals that Elizabeth, a girl of unusual sensitivity and intelligence, would face in her lifetime. First came the hellish year she and other black students endured inside Central, and then decades in which the trauma from that experience, plus prejudice, poverty, family tragedy, and her own demons kept her from realizing her extraordinary potential.

With enormous courage and resiliency, Elizabeth ultimately made a life for herself and has largely come to peace with her past. Paradoxically, it’s been Hazel, who has led a life of far greater financial and familial security, who now feels wounded and angry. Someone who once embodied racial intolerance feels victimized by another form of prejudice, in which good deeds go unappreciated, forgiveness cannot possibly be won, and public statements of contrition breed only resentment and ridicule.

Concerned over her sudden notoriety, only days after the infamous photograph appeared, Hazel’s parents transferred her from Central to a rural high school closer to home. She never spent a day in school with the Little Rock Nine and played no part in the horrors to which administrators, either lax or actually sympathetic to a small group of segregationist troublemakers, allowed them to be subjected. And she left her new school at 17, got married, and began a family.

But Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective. Tuning in her primitive Philco with the rabbit ears her father had bought her, she heard the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw those black protesters getting hot coffee and ketchup poured on their heads at segregated lunch counters or being routed by fire hoses and German shepherds. Such scenes brought home to her the reality of racial hatred, and of her own small but conspicuous contribution to it. One day, she realized, her children would learn that that snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.

Sometime in 1962 or 1963—no cameras recorded the scene, and she didn’t mark anything down—Hazel, sitting in the trailer in rural Little Rock in which she and her family now lived, picked up the Little Rock directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without telling her husband or pastor or anyone else, she dialed the number. Between sobs, she told Elizabeth that she was that girl, and how sorry she was. Elizabeth was gracious. The conversation lasted a minute, if that. In the South, in the ’60s, how much more did a white girl and a black girl have to say to one another (Margolick, “Lives” 3-7)?

Works cited:

Margolick, David.  “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.”  Slate, October 11, 2011.  Web.  < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2011/10/elizabeth_and_hazel_what_happened_to_the_two_girls_in_the_most_f.html.>

Margolick, David.  “Through a Lens, Darkly.”  Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007.  Web.  <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.>